


Paralitic

by shaedespot



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Post-Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-14
Updated: 2014-07-14
Packaged: 2018-02-08 21:57:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1957548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shaedespot/pseuds/shaedespot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock pays Ella a visit for a very important reason.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Paralitic

 

 

_Daytime, late. The office of Ella M Thompson._

Sherlock walks slowly around the dull beige room decorated sparsely with tasteful modern furniture and books.

“I am not at liberty to discuss other clients with you.” Ella states her hands folded atop a clipboard on her knees.

“Yet you discussed me with him.” Sherlock says, he lifts a glass paperweight and tosses it up playfully.

Ella sighs. “If you haven’t come here to talk about you, I’m afraid I can’t help.”

Sherlock’s eyes tighten. He sets the glass sphere down carefully and walks slowly around the chair. He sits down and leans forward to stare deep into Ella’s eyes. She shifts her posture backwards.

Sherlock inhales,“ You live about an hour out of London, short haired cat, recently passed. Two coffees today, morning habit. You have a fear of the ocean and now your safety obsessed mother is threatening to come live with you, and I can tell from the reflection in your glasses, you just wrote down ‘deflecting, past trauma with lingering chronic stress manifesting in obsessive control seeking behavior.” Sherlock wrinkles his nose and grimaces.

“ Would you like to tell me about him or shall I add ‘uses intelligence as a barrier to recovery?” Ella asks. She then leans forward her eyes level with Sherlock’s, “ You’ll never be an unsolvable case Mr. Holmes. You’ll only be an unsolved one until you let go of what happened, accept it and move on. You are not your past-”

“ Is that what you told John?” Sherlock interrupts, his lips quirked up at the corners.

“ You’re very focused on John. Is there something you need to say regarding him?”

“Please, spare me the pre-canned shrink drivel and do not write ‘believes himself to be above human emotion’ I am… aware of my weaknesses.” Sherlock rolls his eyes.

“Some people, don't consider emotions to be weaknesses,” Ella says tilting her head to catch Sherlock’s eyes under the lock of hair that has fallen across his forehead as he looks down at his hands. “Think of John.”

Sherlock perks up at the name.

There is a long silence. Sherlock leans back into the couch, the fire behind his cold, grey eyes  slowly douses in the ocean of his mind.

He is silent for a long time before he starts with a sigh:

“The mind is a strange place, and yes, I am in fact only human. He held back the tide of self-hatred that follows me everywhere. It’s absence allowed me to become so arrogant. He stood on the tail of my fear and so I  could walk in a world of bliss where nothing could touch me. I had accomplished things and here was someone I deserved actually standing by me. He saved me because he was real. I used to, before he came into my life, truly hate the world. I tried every form of escapism while stubbornly not yet willing to inter my corpse under the earth and be done with it. No one but him was ever comfortable with my gifts remaining mine. Jealousy positively oozed from peoples lips if they were ever obliged to compliment me as though they could shame my good fortune out of me and onto them. But not him, he walked proudly at my side and his eyes never looked upon mine without the pure fondness and joy of a soul that has made it’s home. He displaced the void at my heart and so when it took him I felt it as though the scourge came from within my own body. His painful groans at night awoke me though he slept downstairs and I upstairs so he could be closer to the bathroom. Medical terms and procedures could not clarify it more fully than what I already knew to be true. Christ, I had slept with the man flush against my chest every night; I knew how his body had changed. I still wonder if I had been more  assertive with the doctor if he might have lived. But as it was, it was he and I against it and every day it took us both." Sherlock's face is a pale mask and his words flow out as if etched permanently somewhere in his mind.

Ella says nothing but crosses out John's name on her clipboard. After an inhale Sherlock continues, slower.

"One night he left the house we rented together. Just getting some air. I watched him go, I thought he would be back at nightfall, when he didn’t return I called him, no answer. I sat on my bed and had a talk with him, while I could, while his body wasn’t there to distract me with its beauty. lives end after all, and if he just left I could pretend he had found somewhere better. That was of course a ludicrous fantasy. He returned the next day and greeted me jovially. he hadn’t had the strength to for several weeks. I hesitated to allow him back in, perhaps the illness was in the house, perhaps it was me. From the look of him it had been the last six weeks that had been the dream, his smile was so bright again and he gripped my shoulders with such vigor there by the door I felt as though it was I who was weak, shivering. We stood outside in the cold November air until I couldn’t. I hadn’t even put on shoes in my haste. He had spent the night walking in his coat and the look in his eyes was of one returning from a woodland hike renewed and full of rugged nostalgia. The illness had made it impossible for us to share one body as we used to at night. Only occasionally had it been possible for us to lie together on the couch before the painful contractions in his stomach rendered me useless at his side. A mere witness to the murder of someone who would have died for me, and I for him." Sherlock stares at his hands. All the composure he usually maintained, gone.

" What did you do?" Ella asks her voice soft and steady.

 "As rational and cold as I can be, I am utterly weak in the face of love. I tried what I knew was impossible. I set my whole body and mind into healing him. I am not a good doctor. I can do and understand flawless procedure but ask me to do it day in and day out, and I am like water in a basket but I did it. I rearranged my mind shoved all else aside to make him the center of my focus. We slept together again after that night. We had endured a medical separation under the delusion that things would go back to how they were one day, but now, accepting what I had that night alone on my bed with him outside, I felt the real delusion. I gathered his bones in my arms and clung to anything of him that was not already embedded permanently in me. We allowed not a breath of air to part our skin. When they finally came and took him from me I couldn’t be arsed to say goodbye, there is no goodbye between us. We are fused at the heart, his body just went to the hospital and was buried later as ash.”

Ella nods her pencil still. “What happened then?” she asks softly “That wasn’t the end of it.”

Sherlock wills the fire in his breath to quiet, “What does the end matter if it is really the end. It never is. What continues on is whats delicate. I felt torn open. I cried, His parents sent me a sympathy card, with a picture of him as a child. They never spoke to me. They considered him tarnished even in death, as far as they could see I was just a living witness to his failed life, But to me he was life itself, or what was worth living anyway. We belonged to each other not to the witness of the church but to the witness of truth. The gravity of our existence crushing us together in the vacuum of space.”

The strange mirth that crept into Sherlock’s tone leaves his eyes. He sits with his head between his hands lost in thought. Ella shifts and recrosses her legs. “ I meant the pain, His death didn’t stop the pain did it.”

Sherlock wrinkles his nose again,

 “What is the use of pain? It reminds me that I am alive but why? I can still walk, but he is dead. People understand, but he is still dead. I can breathe, but he is dead. I sleep, but he is dead. I won an award, but he is dead. I am alive, but he is dead. It’s like being dead too but less efficient. I don’t fear death anymore. Two days after he died a man pulled a knife on me, I waited for it. I moved forward to accept the blade with my skin but the man ran away. In hindsight I realize it must be horrifying to look into someone’s eyes and find that they want death more than you have reason to kill them, and that this fate may wait beyond the veil of illusion that keeps us struggling for life.”

 The flame in Sherlock’s eyes has grown chaotic and Ella watches him slowly douse it, swallowing his breaths in silence. “ Yet you didn’t end it. Tell me why.” Ella asks, her voice steady and low despite the almost visible tension in the room.

Sherlock looks at his fingernails.

 “My family would look down upon this, flights of fancy, irrationality, I would too. After graduation, I walked into the woods beyond the graveyard where he is buried. I had a thin pairing knife in my hand. I remembered him running through the leaves when we came there last our eyes mad and alive grinning at each other like beasts in the pit of joyful fury. I had silently leapt beyond him among the long shadows of the trees; desperate to show him why he had chosen me. It is silly until you are there, in that place, when all that actually matters is making him know. With the pairing knife I slit along the underside of a thin branch and retracted from my pocket a small bundle of hair. Black and tan wound together. I pressed them into the center of the branch and then bound it back together with grafting tape. Perhaps in the future someone will discover the remains of two men bound together in life. Perhaps they will be able to make some sense of it because I can not.”

 Ella smiles a little. “Sometimes how we cope does not make sense but it works, all that matters is that it works.”

Sherlock shakes his head but smiles faintly.

"what was his name, your old lover?"

" Victor." Sherlock's smile quivers then disappears.

 “Years have passed and the pain is dull now, its like a wound under a bandage that I forget until It bumps on the table and then I look at it still raw and festering so I clean it, bandage it and move on again. There will always be the scar of his name, the smell of lilac, the color of his hair, things that remind me but don’t hurt. I found his hair wound into the neck of my coat for years after. I would pull it off and let it float down to the floor and promise that I was going to be ok without him. I wonder if it hurts others that my heart is still full of him.”

“ How do you think John feels about this?” Ella asks her head tilting inquisitively. Sherlock arches a brow up and sighs.

“When I first met John he hated me. I, however, felt content to annoy him for the rest of his life five minutes in. Sometimes when I’d look into his eyes however, I would see a void widening as if to encompass my overflowing heart. Somewhere along the line he moved in, as you know, I hazily recall I invited him. Foolish bravado, I thought he was just a little man who I could annoy, but then he started mattering. It had been so long since I wanted life around me. Now being away from him leaves me empty and searching for his contrast. John makes me hungry again. It’s like an unequal equation, I wanted death but then now he makes me want life again and it’s killing me, which is what I wanted, but now I don’t because of him. It’s maddening! Now I would kill myself to be alive for him. It’s mad. I could not go through it again. I nearly killed myself last time I loved if I died this time I won’t be alive for what I died for in the first place? It’s mad."

Sherlock scrubs his hair in his hands his eyes wide on the floor.

Ella taps her pencil on her clipboard, “So what did you do then?”

Sherlock releases his hair and looks up at her,

“ you know what I did. I jumped off a building into a bunch of laundry bags and then rolled out and punctured a pint of blood over my face and played dead."

" Do you know why now?" Ella asks, her deep brown eyes unblinking.

Sherlock's eyes dart to the window and then back to the floor.

"I love annoying John, but that wasn’t for him that was for me. He thinks I’m gone, I’m sure of it. I felt his hand on my wrist and looked into his eyes as he lost me. I didn’t realize until it was too late that I was doing exactly what had been done to me to him, albeit to a lesser extent. I have forced my damage upon him, scarred him with my name and the smell of my shaving cream probably. I’ll have to wait until he understands the fear of life calling him back to understand why I did what I did. Then I’ll come back to him. ”

Ella sighs deeply a pinch of concern playing around her lips. She swallows it down and looks up at Sherlock again impassive. “Do you love John? ”

Sherlock is silent for a moment his eyes flicking through thoughts, “  I still remember Victor. I was so safe in his arms. And I still feel safe in his arms. Even the pain of loss cannot overpower how vastly and truly he loved me even if it was physically in the past. I feel now as though it’s because of him that I met John and have somehow made the right choice for once in my life. I chose him instead of something that would bring me closer to death. I can only hope that when I return I can be good for John so that he chooses me too.”

Ella is silent. She Inhales deeply and reads over what is written on her notepad.

“ What will you do if he does?” she finally asks.

“ Marry him,” Sherlock chuckles.

“ And if he doesn’t?”

“ Who knows.”

**Author's Note:**

> but we all know what happens :(


End file.
